Boy, have I got a soap opera for you. It’s a saga of tech nerdery and an old-school company trying to reinvent itself.

The story starts with Kara Swisher, of All Things D, who has gone gaga over the hiring of Marissa Mayer as Yahoo’s CEO. In the 37 days since the announcement (July 16, 2012) she has personally written 32 articles.

Each one with a title full of pizzazz and humorous photos (of mostly cats). The content is all serious and interesting to read as Marissa seems to be hitting all the right notes. But, the way Kara is playing it out is just too much fun.

Today, I’ve been thinking about my career as a blogger, asking the question, “how the hell did I end up here?”

I never liked writing essays, stories, or pretty much anything on paper. My grades in English from high school through college were mediocre. Everything changed when I wrote that first blog.

You see I’m a talker, always have been since about age 5. I have this vivid memory of stuttering and being unable to speak my mind. Then my Dad was driving me somewhere, we passed the Delta Center (old name of the Salt Lake City Jazz NBA stadium), and my mind clicked. I was able to say whatever I wanted and instantly started gabbing.

I didn’t stop gabbing, and annoying everyone around me, until I found blogging. It was my perfect place to say whatever I wanted. I loved it.

Coincidentally, I don’t feel the need to talk anymore. It’s all left on the blog and my mind, and relationships, are free to be…well, normal.

At work, things progressed pretty smoothly. I was able to convince my bosses to let me start blogging. It was all about the mission and how to improve our work. They liked it, the community liked it, and I was on my way. The reputation I had built up carried me into my next few jobs where part of why they hired me was the blogging.

Then, finally, it was my job. I was hired to be a corporate blogger. It was a great gig and I was able to do what I loved and get paid for it. The next step occurred to me sometime during that job. Instead of blogging for somebody else, why not do it for myself?

A few months later, on July 1, 2011, I took the plunge. Full-time writing for my own site and my own business, and most especially with my own content.

Of course, this changed everything. I went from corporate sponsorship to advertising based. I had to learn how to write for the public at-large, instead of for a specific group of business people. The transition hasn’t been hard, but I can’t say I’ve found my groove. The main issue is determining how to stand out amongst the millions of websites out there.

Which is where I sit today, trying to find my voice and working on building some momentum for this blog. It feels weird to look-back on my progression like this. There is no way I would have imagined it ending up this way. I mean my job at the time I started blogging was a technical trainer for web 2.0. That’s a pretty solid 90-degree career turn.

I guess that means I don’t know how I got here. It just kinda happened. I’ve been following my obsession with blogging for seven years and have yet to stop. I wonder where it will take me next…

The time has come. We’re finally giving female surfers the love they deserve in a brand-new, all-girls magazine, SALTED. The mag, created by the editors of SURFER Magazine, features the best female surfers on the planet, trips to the most idyllic locales, profiles, interviews, history, fashion features, and more. It’s is a much-overdue homage to women’s surfing, all made with the quality, authenticity, and top-notch imagery you’ve come to expect from SURFER.

Hitting newsstands August 14, SALTED is nearly 100 pages of uninterrupted female surf content in an oversized, glossy format. Find it at your local surf shop or bookstore. The digital version will also be available on the Apple Newsstand beginning August 6.

If you’re looking for a surf movie that you can’t find at Blockbuster or Netflix then you will love The Surf Network. This website serves as the web home for all of your favorite surf films.

You can rent, buy, download, and watch pretty much any surf movie movie right on your computer. More from the website:

“TheSurfNetwork.com, is a simple easy to use video-on-demand service that provides access to the largest collection of premium surf video content.”

“When you purchase a video, your viewing rights do not expire. You can watch a purchased video as many times as you would like on your computer or compatible device.” (which includes computer, iPhone, iPad, Boxee, Roku, etc.)

Ikea prints 211 million copies of its product catalog every year. That’s more than 20 times the population of Sweden, the home of the build-it-yourself furniture empire. These are impressive numbers for a print catalog in a digital world, but Ikea is now changing with the times with a head-first dive into augmented reality.

“A lot digital stuff becomes very interesting when you mash it up with the tangible items of the real world,” said Andreas Dahlqvist, Global Deputy Chief Creative Officer of McCann, the creative agency behind the catalog.

Augmented reality features will roll out in the 2013 edition of the print catalog, which will arrive in customers’ mailboxes later this month. Amid pictures of Expedit bookshelves and Boksel tables, Ikea fans will see special printed symbols, each an invite to launch new iPhone and Android smartphone apps for an augmented reality experience.

When you wave your smartphone over pages with digital content, a variety of features appear.

Netflix continued the roll-out of its Just for Kids UI to a number of connected devices this week.

Upon launch, the app prompts viewers to either access the regular Netflix experience or Just for Kids. The kids section adds TV show characters as categories and allows children to find episodes of a show without relying on text. Check out a few snapshots of Just for Kids on the Boxee Box below.

Kids content is undeniably one of Netflix’s key strengths, and the company has been adding numerous kids TV shows from PBS, Nickelodeon and others to its catalog. In fact, Netflix has been so successful with the youngsters that some blame it for Nickelodeon’s recent double-digits ratings drop.

If not for Machinima, you might be unaware that gamers are terrified of zombies and Return of the Jedi, when you really think about it, has a lot of plot holes.

At this point, most of you are probably wondering: What is Machinima?

An online programming company boasting a fanatical following among young males and a staggering 149 million unique users, last month Machinima’s videos were viewed 1.3 billion times (that’s billion, with a “b”). Across YouTube and other online destinations, Machinima claims a total of 101 million subscribers. To put those numbers in perspective, the CBS TV network has about 350,000 subscribers on YouTube and in six years has earned about 1.2 billion views for its online content (compared to 1.3 billion last month for Machinima).

Machinima (pronounced mah-SHIN-eh-mah) is one of a handful of players building massive media companies off Web programming.

**The upper case use of the word refers to the media company. The lower case refers to the genre, defined as the use of real-time 3D computer graphics rendering engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, video games are used to generate the computer animation.**

How big is machinima, and Machinima? “As a genre, I’d say that 90 percent of gamers know what it is,” says Tom Akel, executive producer of MTV Geek.“As a company, maybe every college kid playing Madden and Tiger Woods golf doesn’t know them, but most millennial male gamers do.”

Silicon Beach Fest is LA’s first festival organized by its tech community to celebrate LA tech, entertainment & startups with panels, keynotes, workshops, mixers, and more at a dozen venues focused in Santa Monica and Venice on June 21-23, 2012. Head to the beach on the first weekend of summer to celebrate LA’s digital innovators!

Then Angel Pitch Day is the event for you. If your idea is selected, you will get to participate at Angel Pitch Day where you will have an opportunity to pitch your idea to a live audience of angel investors.

You will have 2 minutes to deliver your pitch, then you will get candid feedback from top angels on your idea. Hear what they have to say and their insights into how you can improve your idea.

Users of blogging platform WordPress can now take advantage of greater integration with Facebook following the social network’s release of a plugin that enables features such as social publishing and mentions.

The plugin allows users of both platforms to cross-post their WordPress content to their timeline profiles and pages they manage, as well as to add the names of pages or friends to the posts.

YouTube is getting smaller in a metric that used to mean everything: views.

Since December, views on YouTube have dropped 28%, and March views are only slightly above what they were a year ago, startling for a site accustomed to breakneck growth.

It’s an intended consequence of the Google-owned site’s shift from…snack-size content to a full-fledged, couch-potato-optimized entertainment destination. At YouTube, the “view” is out and “engagement” is in.

YouTube’s focus has shifted from directing viewers to videos of skateboarding dogs to enticing them into longer, more engaging videos—the kind that are, not incidentally, more appealing to advertisers.

On March 15, YouTube altered its recommendation system to make the time spent with a video or channel a stronger indicator than a click.

“Our goal is we want users to watch more and click less”

It appears to be working. While views have dropped of late, the amount of minutes users spend watching YouTube has grown over the past year by 57%. The average length of a video view has grown a full minute to four minutes in the past year.